- Location
- Luton Airport
It's just a basic Faraday Cage principle.
An alternate evolution of the castle in fantasy
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
On the other hand, the copper market becomes really lucrative and living near a copper mine becomes the best shit ever.
Well, copper is still strong enough for sword-stopping chainmail, though it's more likely to be used in bronze or brass. Which are, themselves, rather useful for cheap armor after ironworks becomes a thing. Sure, they won't stop maces or spikes or good axes very well, but it'll keep you safe from most wild animals and swords, and the lightning magic protection is very helpful.
Also, lightning rods. If they mess with the accuracy of lightning magic, they are going to be everywhere that expects hostile magic users. And once electronics start being a thing, the zinc and copper mines will keep their use, though zinc will fall out of favor for it's lower conductivity.
That's exactly how it was described where I heard it, yes. A documentary on TV about either being an electrician or power line maintenance. Can't remember which.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
If Sith lightning isn't lightning, then what else could it be?
Anyway me thinks OP should differentiate levels of magic dependant on the setting. There should be like, levels of magic and how common magic is to the people of the setting. The difference between a mage who can Fireball and a mage who can summon meteor showers is pretty major.
Look at Elder Scrolls. The thing about magic in Elder Scrolls is it's over-represented. The average person is not gonna see a dude running around with lightning and fire in his hands all that often. You are Shezzarine, you are the exception. That's why Shezzarines can be considered demigods in the setting, and in the case of the Dragonborn, a literal demigod.
Imperial Battlemages, the arcane arm of the Empire, are really rare. You don't see much of them in Morrowind onwards because they're far too valuable to be spending time in the game area where you play. Add the fact how most of the Shadow Legion were wiped out at Battlespire, and you just lost the institution that produces your artillery teams.
And despite that, all nations still have access to siege engines meaning. Not every mage is Zurin Actus or Divath Fyr.
Compare that to Avatar, where Benders are the norm. While I can't recall the military architecture of the series atm, no doubt that a proper fort would be designed to withstand at most Firebenders and Earthbenders, because they're the two dominant Benders in the series. I truly doubt Waterbenders on the poles design their forts to be used against other Waterbenders and Airbenders don't fight at all, thus the lack of a military.
Hate, projected as a form of energy by Force-users in order to inflict pain.If Sith lightning isn't lightning, then what else could it be?
This is space magic, you thought it would be realistic?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And when we do see them fight, we see why it's good that they don't.
Bronze is harder than iron, and far more expensive.
Iron proliferated not because it was good, but because it was cheap.
It's only gonna be the cheap option in places that have good reserves of both copper and tin (mostly tin, copper was pretty much everywhere but there were literally five good sources of tin in the entirety of ancient Europe) and thus don't have to spend out the ass to ship tin into Greece from fucking Czechia.
(Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia, Czechia, and northern Italy, btw. If you want tin in antiquity, it's that, nothing, Bolivia, Mexico, China, or Thailand - so much Thailand - and Malaysia. That is literally it)
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Space magic or no, like, it still looks like electricity! I dunno man, it still has to follow consistency. For all the flare magic lightning is in fiction, a real taser just looks downright terrifying.
Are these major sources of tin? I'm not entirely sure with how you worded it.
Only when you look at it as a weapon instead of what it is, an instrument of torture.
If used too long on the same person it can have lasting effects, like forcing them to constantly feel the pain it caused for the rest of their life.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
But isn't Sith Lightning commonly used in combat?
Sith aren't known for their intelligence, and most of them are sadists.
The ones I listed are the non-Europe major sources of tin. Thailand down Malaysia has this absurd chain of deposits, it might be like half the world's tin right there.
Tin is incredibly rare. Bronze was an extremely good metal, far stronger than iron (bronze ranges from double to over triple non-steel iron's hardness), but you had to have a lot of globalization and healthy trade networks to do bronze because Europe and the Middle East had literally four good sources of tin.
Once the Bronze Age Collapse happened, people were forced to go to iron because they couldn't get tin to create bronze due to global trade networks having completely disintegrated. Bronze was straight-up better until people worked out steel, and even today it has some utterly incomparable properties in terms of resilience (there's a sword from 500 BC that's still sharp).
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
I admit, this seems to contradict a lot of what I've seen with Force combat.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
Was that Chinese? I remember hearing of a Chinese bronze or stainless steel sword that was sharp after millennia.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
So Tyranny's control of iron is bull? The fact their elite forces are the only ones using iron is hurting them?
The Games are generally really bad about how the Force actually works. Killing a guy can be a big deal for strong force users, but some games have you racking up legions of bodies to your name.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
The idea that D&D scale magic is remotely comparable to modern explosives is bizarre to me.
Do people just forget that like, 75% of all D&D games take place underground in caves.
If D&D spells operated like modern explosives 99% of adventuring careers would end with the party crushed by collapsing cave systems.
Do people just forget that like, 75% of all D&D games take place underground in caves.
If D&D spells operated like modern explosives 99% of adventuring careers would end with the party crushed by collapsing cave systems.
Yes, it's the Sword of Goujian, specifically.
To be clear, this beauty is unusually well preserved, it's not the average of bronze, but bronze does still have a lot of preservability, and substantially more resistance to rust, corrosion, and metal fatigue.
These guys are some of the oldest swords in history, dating back to about 3600 years ago.
Well, I haven't played Tyranny, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. I heard there was something about the iron holding enchantments or something?
But whatever might be going on on a magical level aside, cheapness is its own advantage. A force with three hundred iron swords is slightly less well equipped than a force with three hundred bronze swords, but it's the same cost as a force with fifty bronze swords and nothing else, or ten bronze swords and two hundred and ninety wood/stone clubs (numbers are inexact, the specific price ratio of iron to bronze in antiquity is beyond my expertise and numbers are only used to illustrate the point), and is a hell of a lot better equipped than that one is. Quantity has a quality all its own.
Though I legitimately have no idea how you'd make yourselves the only ones using iron, it's cheap as hell because it's the most common metal in the universe and one of the easiest to forge (at least at the basic early levels), but if you're the only one who cracked early steel or something then you get a performance edge and pretty cheaply as long as you keep the techniques secret? Like I said, I don't know the game too well.
- Location
- Luton Airport
One very broad difference between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age is a general move from a paradigm of smaller armies and champions/levies, to larger armies of more uniformly equipped soldiers, due to the greater availability of iron.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Ah, so that means it doesn't make sense at all.
Lemme explain:
In the world of Terratus, Overlord Kyros has taken over most of the known world. Part of her policy is suppressing the knowledge of iron, and only a select few of Magesmiths called the Forgedbound know the true secret of iron. Which means the majority of weapons still in use during the game is bronze. And no, I have no idea what this "secret" actually is despite magic being something everyone can practice.
That's all well and good until you realise that iron weapons are reserved only for Kyros' most elite troops. The Disfavored, the phalanx of Kyros, all use iron weapons. They're even known as the Iron Legion. Compared to the other army of Kyros, the Scarlet Chorus, who primarily use whatever they can get their hands of from the battlefield: so mostly bronze.
I'd cite army numbers but I have none. In game there's at most a dozen NPCs on the screen. The lore makes it clear that the Disfavored are very small but very strong while the Scarlet Chorus is a horde that conscripts everyone under the sun.
SO THAT MEANS THAT the most ELITE soldiers of the Overlord is technically using inferior weapons despite the fact bronze is so incredibly common! But hold on, in game, iron weapons is stronger than bronze.
You know the standard: Gold > Silver > Copper in a lot of fantasy? Well in Tyranny it's: Iron > Copper > Bronze. Also it's rings, not coins.
Which means two things:
1. In Terratus, iron has the quality of bronze and vice versa.
2. Iron is far far rarer than it is in our world.
That's really the only logical conclusion I can come up with. I have a hard time believing Obsidian screwed this up somehow. This must be a plot point for a future game or something.
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- Location
- Luton Airport
Only way that'd work is if the "secret" of Iron is that it's really Steel, and Tin is for some reason ubiquitous on this world (if Bronze is somehow worth less than Copper).
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
This is my headcanon now.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
It seems believable to me? I mean, this is the first time I'm hearing about this.
'Bronze has superior qualities compared to iron' sounds like the sort of thing you'd learn as a materials science guy, not as a game developer.
- Location
- Luton Airport
It's not like you have to do in-depth research to find it out.
"Though bronze is generally harder than wrought iron, with Vickers hardness of 60–258 vs. 30–80,[11] the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age because iron was easier to find than copper and tin,[12] and iron was easier to process into a usable grade of metal than bronze."
Something important to note on the "cannonball vs fireball" point.
A cannonball doesn't explode, per se. What happens is that a cannonball made of metal is propelled at a target through gunpowder and releases its kinetic energy on impact, either tearing the target apart, pulping it, smashing it, or getting torn apart on impact and releasing lethal shrapnel.
A fireball is... made of fire. It burns, probably releases a cone or radius of flame on impact, uses up a lot of oxygen and sets flammable shit on fire and thus being incredibly lethal, especially against personnel -- but it acts in a completely different way than a cannonball would.
It's difference between firing a stone or a claypot with Greek Fire out of a trebuchet. Or using a cannon versus a flamethrower.
A mage that can conjure flame will not have the same impact as a cannon, and thus magic may not actually have a great impact on fortification unless they can directly destroy the fortification or circumvent it.
- Location
- Luton Airport
Yeah, magic would bring a raft of changes to sieges, but other than the "walking WMD" casters, it'd be more utility stuff to enhance sapping and assaults rather than direct magical bombardment to destroy the walls themselves.